All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

wget progress bar with customized data size for dots

Remove duplicate rows of an un-sorted file based on a single column
The command (above) will remove any duplicate rows based on the FIRST column of data in an un-sorted file. The '$1' represents a positional parameter. You can change both instances of '$1' in the command to remove duplicates based on a different column, for instance, the third: $ awk '{ if ($3 in stored_lines) x=1; else print; stored_lines[$3]=1 }' infile.txt > outfile.txt Or you can change it to '$0' to base the removal on the whole row: $ awk '{ if ($0 in stored_lines) x=1; else print; stored_lines[$0]=1 }' infile.txt > outfile.txt ** Note: I wouldn't use this on a MASSIVE file, unless you're RAM-rich ;) **

remove empty lines in place with backup
Modify file in place to remove empty lines and create a backup of the original with the extension .bak

Fork Bomb for Windows
Quick and dirty forkbomb for all flavors of windows Do not use in production. Replace start with a command of your choice, this will just open a new command prompt and is pretty tricky to stop once started

Find longest running non-root processes on a machine
If you have ever been trying to look for a list of processes based on their elapsed time you don't need to look any further. This command lets you find the list of processes ordered in a reversed order (oldest at the top) that have been running for over an hour on your system. Any system processes are filtered out, leaving only user initiated ones in. I find it extremely useful for debugging and performance analysis.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Check to make sure the whois nameservers match the nameserver records from the nameservers themselves
Change the $domain variable to whichever domain you wish to query. Works with the majority of whois info; for some that won't, you may have to compromise: domain=google.com; for a in $(whois $domain | grep "Domain servers in listed order:" --after 3 | grep -v "Domain servers in listed order:"); do echo ">>> Nameservers for $domain from $a

disable caps lock
a quick one-line way to disable caps lock while running X.

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text. Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent. Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher. (Does not require GNU date like some other commands)


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: